Qubes Manager and modal windows

[nielsk]

Qubes OS version (e.g., R3.1):

R3.1, R3.2RC1

Affected TemplateVMs (e.g., fedora-23, if applicable):

---

Expected behavior:

When I do something like updating dom0 or another action that brings up a new window created by the manager, I should be able to do something else in the manager while that window is open.

Actual behavior:

You click for example that dom0 shall get updated and a modal window appears, the Manager gets darker and you cannot do any action in the manager until a certain state of the update is reached.

Steps to reproduce the behavior:

Try to update dom0 in the Qubes Manager or any other action that will create a new window.

[andrewdavidwong]

Note: This could possibly be superseded by #1870 or, more likely, #2132.

[andrewdavidwong]

Note: This could possibly be superseded by #1870 or, more likely, #2132.

[jpouellet]

This bothered me too, but...

There various assumptions in qubes-manager which make this not a trivial change. A side-effect of the way this is now helps to ensure consistency.

Consider this rather user-visible example:

• VM is off.
• Opening VM settings dialog shows enabled controls for options which are only mutable while VM is off (for example device assignment)
• Turn vm on! (which would be easy to do with a non-modal dialog)
• Add some devices and click Ok
  Now what...

The operation cannot proceed. Do we have all the proper asserts to ensure it does not attempt to and leave things in an inconsistent state? Best case the user just gets a very unhelpful stack trace, worst case then end up with an inconsistent qubes.xml or something.

IMO it appears not worth trying to fix, at least until we are satisfied with the result of #2132.

[jpouellet]

This bothered me too, but...

There various assumptions in qubes-manager which make this not a trivial change. A side-effect of the way this is now helps to ensure consistency.

Consider this rather user-visible example:

• VM is off.
• Opening VM settings dialog shows enabled controls for options which are only mutable while VM is off (for example device assignment)
• Turn vm on! (which would be easy to do with a non-modal dialog)
• Add some devices and click Ok
  Now what...

The operation cannot proceed. Do we have all the proper asserts to ensure it does not attempt to and leave things in an inconsistent state? Best case the user just gets a very unhelpful stack trace, worst case then end up with an inconsistent qubes.xml or something.

IMO it appears not worth trying to fix, at least until we are satisfied with the result of #2132.

[andrewdavidwong]

IMO it appears not worth trying to fix, at least until we are satisfied with the result of #2132.

This is one of the reasons for the P: minor label and Far in the future milestone. Those and, of course, the lack of dev time to devote to this.

[andrewdavidwong]

IMO it appears not worth trying to fix, at least until we are satisfied with the result of #2132.

This is one of the reasons for the P: minor label and Far in the future milestone. Those and, of course, the lack of dev time to devote to this.

[marmarta]

This has been fixed in the 4.0 decomposed Qubes Manager; the fix won't be back-ported to 3.2 due to amount of work needed, so I'm going to close this one.

[marmarta]

This has been fixed in the 4.0 decomposed Qubes Manager; the fix won't be back-ported to 3.2 due to amount of work needed, so I'm going to close this one.